1. Field of Invention
This present invention relates to the capturing, processing, mapping, reporting, and displaying of telecommunication call events that occur on either landline or wireless telecommunication devices (i.e., POTS telephones, cellular telephones, 3G-based wireless data/telephones, etc.), where the information content of the telecommunication call events can be presented locally on the device or remotely on a desktop or laptop computer using a computer application or a web browser that can interface to an online networked server.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telecommunication devices, specifically wireless telephones, are achieving widespread use today. Such telecommunication devices are commonly used to establish communication between other telecommunication devices. Recently telecommunication devices are becoming more than just communication devices, but also a computing platform for executing applications similar to the early days of the personal computer era, where devices had limited memory and processing resources. The difference is that these new telecommunication devices, while currently provide a limited computing platform, also enable wireless data access to the Internet and expose the telephone's telephony functionality. These new telecommunication devices are well known to people that are skilled in the art.
Prior art systems, such as customer premises equipment (CPE) enable the storage capability of caller identification (Caller ID) information of incoming calls, assuming that said Caller ID information is not blocked. For example, Lucent Technologies produces a model ISDN 8520T CPE that keeps a log of unanswered incoming, answered incoming, and outgoing telephone calls. Each call has a time stamp associated with it so that unanswered calls can be distinguished from available calls that have Caller ID information. When the CPE is used with a switch, such as an ISDN PBX switch, the CPE will provide each caller's name if it is stored in the switch's database. As individuals that pay telephone bills know, all of this caller information is also preferably included in a customer's telephone bills for the purpose of billing information and is well known to people that are skilled in the art.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) prior art applications provide a solution to understand customer related pipelines, such as sales or support team's pipelines. For sales, it is important to keep track of a company's Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities. Every Account has a Contact or group of Contacts that are associated with the Account. Every Opportunity has one or many Accounts that are associated with the Opportunity and indirectly have Contacts that are associated with the Opportunity through a common Account or Accounts. Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities have activities, such as telephone calls, that are associated with one or more of the Account, Opportunity, or Contact categories (i.e., a telephone call can be associated with a Contact that also has associations with an Account and an Opportunity). Prior art CRM systems are well known to people skilled in the art.
A problem with existing prior art CPE and switch systems is that they only provide a mechanism for capturing call logs at the switch that the telecommunication device interfaces with. This is not practical with wireless telecommunication devices, since acquiring access to a switch at a base station is not reasonable due to the large number of base stations necessary to create a cellular wireless network. Also, accessing the call logs directly from different wireless or landline carriers introduces interface and connection issues, since carriers use different standards that are not compatible with other carriers.
Another problem with accessing the call logs directly from a wireless or landline carrier is that each telecommunication carrier, which may be grouped in a local area or across an entire continent, would have to provide access to, or expose, call log information for their entire user-base on their networks. This introduces a significant privacy problem, in addition to requiring significant bandwidth to transport all of the users' call logs, since not all users on said networks will subscribe to this advanced service that integrates and associates call logs with database records.
Yet another problem is that call logging by the wireless or landline carrier only provides call logs specifically for billing purposes, and the advanced Telecommunication Call Events that the telecommunication device can provide are not provided. For example, this invention provides a Telecommunication Call Event to include the GPS position of the telecommunication device at the time the device received, missed, or initiated a telephone call, or during the entire duration of the telephone call.
An additional problem with existing call logging systems, such as the CPE, is that the centralized logging solution does not always have the capability of being disabled or turned off. Specifically, this is the case for carrier specific switches whose main function is to record calls for billing purposes. By handling the Telecommunication Call Event recording (i.e., call logging) functions on the telecommunication devices, the authorized user can have the ability to disable the call logging functionality simply and effectively.
It is yet another problem with the prior art system when a user owns or makes calls from multiple telecommunication devices (i.e., a landline telephone, a wireless telephone, etc.), specifically when the telecommunication devices are operated on different carrier networks, since interfacing with each call logging switch amongst all of the carriers that the telecommunication device connects with is very difficult and a daunting task. This problem is further exaggerated if the user owns a wireless telecommunication device with roaming capability and “roams” into a different wireless carrier network. With prior art systems, access to all possible roaming networks would be required to provide a continuous call logging solution.
Another problem with existing database applications, such as CRM applications, is that the user is required to manually enter the Telecommunication Call Event associations (i.e., such as telephone number associations) into database records, such as Contact data (i.e., vCARD), Accounts, or the like. Providing a system that autonomously updates the call history information would provide better real-time forecasting and reporting information. As people that are skilled in the art will agree, this significantly improves the effectiveness of such systems.
Until now, an adequate solution to these problems has eluded those skilled in the art. Thus, there exists a need to provide a solution that enables Telecommunication Devices to capture Telecommunication Call Events for enabling the association of Telecommunication Call Events with database records, which may include without limitation Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, Forecasts, Leads, Tasks, Documents, Cases, other Events, or the like. This invention provides many important benefits for Telecommunication Devices which are an important and integral part of improving Work Flow-related processes.